Here is a thought. On the fringes of human experience, what resembles those things better: Dali or Caravaggio? I think, at least at first glance, the answer is Dali.
A video on deep-sea creatures I watched makes the point vividly. As one descends through the twilight zone, the midnight zone, the abyssal plain, and finally the hadal trenches, life becomes progressively stranger to ordinary human perception. One enters a realm of darkness, freezing temperature, immense pressure, transparency, bioluminescence, ultra-black skin, grotesque forms, and survival strategies that seem almost dreamlike to the surface imagination. The creatures are not unreal, but they do appear surreal. They look like symbols, hallucinations, or fragments from the subconscious. Yet they are perfectly fitted to their environment. They are not absurdities. They are rational adaptations appearing irrational only because we are judging them from the wrong world.^1
That is why Dali can seem a better artistic analogue than Caravaggio when we move toward the margins of ordinary experience. Caravaggio is a painter of realism, gravity, incarnation, flesh, and revelation breaking into the visible world. His drama is intense, but it remains anchored in a humanly proportioned world. The Calling of Saint Matthew is dramatic precisely because grace enters an ordinary room of men, money, gesture, and light. The world is dark, but intelligible. The figures are concrete. Their humanity remains stable and legible.^2 Dali, by contrast, is the painter of distortion, dream logic, symbol, elastic form, and the uncanny. In The Persistence of Memory, hard objects become soft, time seems to melt, and the whole scene is rendered with technical precision while remaining oneiric and unstable. Dali is powerful because he captures what reality can feel like when it no longer presents itself in ordinary proportion.^3
This matters because a great deal of modern life no longer appears to us in normal proportion. The media environment, in particular, often works in a surreal way. It does not simply present facts in a neutral manner. It stretches, magnifies, miniaturizes, repeats, distorts, and arranges them into psychological atmospheres. Things are rarely denied outright. Rather, they are made disproportionate. One image is made luminous; another disappears into darkness. One narrative is exaggerated until it governs the imagination; another is buried beneath noise. In this sense, media manipulation is often less like a direct lie and more like a dream sequence constructed in public. It creates emotional weather. It constructs symbolic pressure. It forms a field of perception in which people react before they judge.
That is why Aquinas alone, at least as popularly received, can seem insufficient for such phenomena. I am not saying Aquinas is actually insufficient. I am saying that many who invoke Aquinas do so in a way that remains only at the level of conceptual clarity. Aquinas gives us distinctions, causes, faculties, appetites, virtue, vice, and the objective order of reality. He is indispensable for that reason. In the Summa, he describes passion as a movement of the sensitive appetite arising from the apprehension of good or evil, and he also notes that passions can indirectly move the will.^4 This is deeply important, because it means that man is not simply a clear-thinking intellect floating above his emotional life. He is embodied, affective, moved by images, and vulnerable to disordered passions. Aquinas actually gives us the metaphysical and moral architecture for understanding manipulation. But that architecture must be activated.
Freud becomes useful precisely at this point, though only in a limited and disciplined sense. Freud saw that human beings are not transparent to themselves. He insisted that much of mental life lies beneath conscious awareness and that dreams reveal disguised patterns of desire, fear, displacement, and symbolization. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he famously called dream interpretation the “royal road” to knowledge of the unconscious.^5 Whatever one thinks of Freud’s excesses, reductions, and errors, he grasped something real: there are subterranean processes in man that do not present themselves in the crisp forms of explicit rationality. Human beings are not only logical; they are symbolic, driven, defensive, and often divided within themselves.^6
This is why the binary between Aquinas and Freud is too simple, but it is still suggestive. Aquinas gives the structure of reality. Freud gives an account, however flawed, of the opacity of the subject. Aquinas tells us that reality is intelligible and ordered. Freud tells us that the human subject often receives and distorts reality through mechanisms it does not fully understand. Aquinas gives being; Freud gives suspicion. Aquinas gives clarity; Freud gives subterranean pressure. If one absolutizes Freud, he becomes corrosive and reductive. If one simplifies Aquinas into mere conceptual tidiness, one fails to account for the bizarre, symbolic, and manipulated character of modern consciousness.
The same is true of Caravaggio and Dali. Caravaggio remains closer to the sacramental structure of reality. He shows the world as dense, embodied, and penetrated by grace. Dali shows what happens when experience reaches the edge, when the ordinary coordinates begin to warp, when the world feels more like the subconscious than the marketplace. Both matter. But if the question is what better resembles the fringes of human experience, or the strange symbolic distortions of media environments, then Dali often has the advantage. He understands the form of unreality within reality. He shows that the bizarre can still be precise.
The deeper point, however, is not to move beyond Aquinas but to recover a fuller realism. Reality includes both order and distortion, both ontology and phenomenology, both stable being and unstable appearance. The deep ocean is not chaos; it is order under extreme conditions.^1 Media manipulation is not pure fiction; it is distortion under symbolic conditions. The subconscious is not the whole man; it is one layer of man. Thus, the task is not to abandon clarity but to allow clarity to descend into the depths.
So yes, understanding things “outside of the clarity of Aquinas” has value. But only if that means broadening our field of vision, not surrendering the truth. Dali without Caravaggio becomes dissolution. Freud without Aquinas becomes reductionism. But a Thomism that can look into the surreal, symbolic, manipulative, and subconscious dimensions of life without panic—that is a Thomism large enough for the modern world.
Endnotes
- “Why Deep Sea Creatures Get Creepier the Deeper You Go,” YouTube video transcript, accessed via YT Scribe; the transcript describes descent through the twilight, midnight, abyssal, and hadal zones, emphasizing darkness, pressure, bioluminescence, transparency, and increasingly strange adaptations.
- Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, “Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew,” Smarthistory; see also the work’s basic identification and subject. The painting is described as the moment of Matthew’s spiritual awakening in an ordinary interior pierced by dramatic light.
- Museum of Modern Art, “Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)”; MoMA describes the work as a small, meticulously rendered painting whose dreamlike distortions have become emblematic of Surrealism.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 22, a. 3, on passion as a movement of the sensitive appetite following apprehension of good or evil; and I-II, q. 77, a. 1, on how passion can indirectly move the will.
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Freud presents dream interpretation as the “royal road” to knowledge of unconscious mental activity.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Sigmund Freud,” on Freud’s concept of the unconscious as mental activity not simply outside present awareness but not readily available to consciousness except through analytic work.